* poets in novels and countdown update

“Coming on the scene, he thought what a mercy shipwrecks were, how clean, their horrors swallowed by the sea. Not so here.”

***

The above is from the book I just finished, Bruce Duffy’s Disaster was my God: a novel about the outlaw life of Arthur Rimbaud. The book covers in a meandering manner the life and death of a poet who, after five years of brilliant writing that changed the course of poetry for years to come, swears off writing and runs off to be a sort of mercenary merchant in Africa.

Having a poet as the hero of your novel is always a gamble. Will they be believable? Duffy’s Rimbaud, I’m happy to say, is pretty convincing.

Not only is Duffy able to pull off lines like the ones above, that present an idea, a parallel verging on metaphor, and follow through, but there are several moments where you feel like he is trying to sneak in pieces of poems into his narrative. Here is a snapshot of the poet Paul Verlaine:

“…squinty eyes. The beard is thin and leonine, the forehead a looming moon, the mouth a single crooked horizontal line as might have been drawn by a somber child on a rainy day.”

Phrasing such as this means even more when you find it in a novel about the poet who brought the prose poem into use. The focused wording, the leaps of logic – Duffy spins his story well-versed in the, ahem, verse of his subject. Here is a snapshot of the young Rimbaud before he ran away for good:

“Perfect eyes. Perfect hearing. Perfect skin. Hair still cut, nails clean: studious, well dressed, polite. Perhaps most amazing under the circumstances is that fact that behind those angelic blue eyes burns a soul remarkably intact, million-leaved like a great oak lifting its branches, aroused, in the evening wind.”

The punctuation here is fascinating. The initial clipped sentences, then the mix of details paced with commas and a colon. Then that expansive description of the soul. Read closely this excerpt has the effect of watching a card dealer change speeds while dealing out cards then stopping to look you in the eye.

***

The other gamble of writing a poet in your novel is attaining a sense of truth in your description of this specific writing process. For me, Duffy gets it right, as in this interaction between an elder poet and the young Rimbaud:

“…but, Monsieur Rimbaud, surely as poets, it is our job to explain, to be clear.”

“No,” said the boy testily, “but you see, when I read your writings – many of you – you labor to explain. To merely be clear, as if a poem were, what, a newspaper? Read once, then used to wipe your — “

Rather than an argument between two people, this could easily be the transcript of an argument in a single poet’s head.

***

As for the countdown, I plan on going tonight to another East of Edith open mic. I am going to be reading from my forthcoming chapbook, The Wall. I haven’t read these in public yet, so, wish me luck.

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Published by Jose Angel Araguz

José Angel Araguz is a CantoMundo fellow and the author of six chapbooks as well as the collections Everything We Think We Hear (Floricanto Press) and Small Fires (FutureCycle Press). His poems, prose, and reviews have appeared in RHINO Poetry, New South, and Queen Mob’s Tea House. He runs the poetry blog The Friday Influence and teaches English and creative writing at Linfield College.
View all posts by Jose Angel Araguz